We are fairly in the heart of the forest; horses—those that survived the ongaonga—sent back to Te Kuiti under the charge of the packer; our provisions—hard biscuit and tinned stuff, divided into equal sized pikaus among the nine of us, sheath-knives and tin pannikins on belts; ready for the week's tramp.

Hursthouse carried a double-barrel gun, and this got us a pigeon now and again to help out the hard tack. It was hard going, that tramp through the heart of the greatest forest in the Island. We forded frequent streams, rocky or muddy; we swarmed up cliffy hillsides as thickly wooded as the levels, hanging on by tree-roots, swinging up by the hanging aka vines or the tufts of hill-flax; pikaus growing heavier as the day went on, and the sharp corners digging trenches in one's shoulders, packed we the tinned stuff ever so carefully. Grateful were the spells for rest and smoke, and the mid-day billy-boiling half-hour; more grateful still the sundown halt for camp and rest for the weary. But the good days they were!

Elastic were the well-limbered muscles in those days of hard training and rough marching. We rolled out at daylight from the halftent shelter or the lee of a patriarchal tree eager for the day's work, and for the new country that it opened up to us. To me every step was through an enchanted land.

We knew that very few had been before us. They could all have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, the veteran Hursthouse himself, with all his thirty years of Taranaki survey, had never been right through on this trail. Julian, who was Taranaki-born, was the one man who knew it from end to end, and even he, as he went ahead with his slash-hook, was at fault at times, and we had to cut across untracked ridges and swamps and ford creeks unmarked on the map.